Report From Engine Co. 82 - Dennis Smith [93]
Merchants were good to firefighters then, because they expected firefighters to be good in return as they made their annual, semi-annual, or monthly fire inspections. But, the system has changed now. Firefighters are perceiving themselves as professionals, and they perform inspectional duties with the diligence of a woodpecker pecking at a soft tree. Violation orders are written if the proper number of portable fire extinguishers arc not hung on the walls of factories, and summonses are issued for locked exit doors. There is no bargaining for future discounts, and there are no promises of free merchandise. Firefighters know that a conscientious inspection can mean the difference between life and death. Souls are not sold anymore for a ten percent discount, or a two-dollar movie ticket, or a ten-dollar dress for the wife.
I was inspecting a restaurant recently. It was housed on the ground floor of an old two-story wooden frame building. The place was clean, but I noticed that the ducts over the oven were coated thickly with grease. I began to write a violation order. The owner folded a twenty-dollar bill and laid it on the table. He didn’t offer it to me, he just let it sit there beside the salt and pepper. “Listen, I’ll get the ducts cleaned, but I don’t want a record of the violation,” he said. A double-sawbuck is a night out for my wife and me, or new shoes for the kids, or a hundred other things we need that twenty dollars can buy. I earn $10,950 a year, but it doesn’t go far. I pay my bills, and that’s all. I have no savings account, no investments in stocks or bonds. The only investments I’ve ever made were in a house and a car. If my boys want to go to college, I have to pray that they will be smart enough to pass scholarship exams. Twenty dollars is a lot of money to me. But it doesn’t take much heat to ignite grease, and when it ignites in the confines of a duct it spreads fast. The duct metal radiates the heat until the building is on fire. The people living above the restaurant would be burned out, if not burned to death. And even if there were no people living above, there is an insurance company that would have to cover the building loss. I handed him the violation, and said, “We’ll be back in two weeks.” Of course, I could have reported him for an attempted bribe, but I understood that he was operating in an old system. I did not want to jail the man, but teach him.
The swearing-in ceremony was held on a Saturday, and we were ordered to report to the department’s training school the following Monday. It was a humid June morning as I rode the bus from Manhattan to Queens. The iron expansion plates of the Queensborough Bridge sang as the bus wheels rolled over them. It was a happy day for me—the beginning of a new, stable, secure life. From the bridge I could see the training tower of the Fire School rising high on Welfare Island, a two-mile strip of land in the middle of the East River, between Queens and Manhattan. I took another bus from Queens to Welfare Island, and there my career as a firefighter was bom.
We began each morning, Monday to Friday for eight weeks, with forty-five minutes of calisthenics, push-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups, jumping, and running. Then, there were three hours of classroom work—learning building codes, inspection procedures, fire laws, first aid, building construction, the science of fire, the science of fire control, and about building fires, car fires, ship fires, chemical fires, explosions, implosions, the telegraph alarm system, bell-signal codes, community relations, arson investigation, and a hundred other subjects as diffuse and difficult as any college course I’ve taken.